Love Making vs Sex - Song of Songs 7-8

 Song of Songs 8:2-3 (ESV)

I would lead you and bring you

into the house of my mother—

she who used to teach me.

I would give you spiced wine to drink,

the juice of my pomegranate.

His left hand is under my head,

and his right hand embraces me!

Song of Songs is a love story.  The passages are filled with rather descriptive language of two people in love and even consummating that love either in their dreams or in actuality.   

In the above passage we have a description of the desire of the woman for the man.   She wants to lead him back to her home (at this point she has no home but her family home and no bed but her mother’s).  We have read something like this before:

Song of Songs 3:4 (ESV)

Scarcely had I passed them

when I found him whom my soul loves.

I held him, and would not let him go

until I had brought him into my mother's house,

and into the chamber of her who conceived me.

This is a young woman with no place to call home.  In her home she would have slept with her siblings, or alone a floor in a space for children.   She desires to bring him someplace for their intimacy to be fulfilled.   This is the end of the book and they are now ready for this stage of their relationship (although the more descriptive part of their physical relationship began in chapter two).    The imagery of her giving him “spice wine to drink and juice from her pomegranate” is a metaphor for their sexual intimacy.   Solomon uses similar language here to describe how the adulterous woman (Woman Folly) entices us:

Proverbs 9:2-5 (ESV)

She has slaughtered her beasts; she has mixed her wine;

she has also set her table.

She has sent out her young women to call

from the highest places in the town,

“Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!”

To him who lacks sense she says,

“Come, eat of my bread

and drink of the wine I have mixed.

In this description of their love making the woman tells us that he has put his left hand under her head and his right hand around her waist.  This is the physical embrace she longs for.    The point of the story for us to remember the beauty and wonder of the experience God has created in loving making.   She uses the senses of touch, of smell, of taste and totally submission to one another to describe this act that Hollywood and the porn industry has so fully destroyed.   In Solomon’s description we find the beauty of love making.  In the world we see the unfolding of sex.   These two are giving of themselves to each other and all the senses are arouse.  It is not just sex.  It is the expression of all the senses to pleasure the other person.  That is Solomon’s vision of intimacy in a relationship.